Narrative out of nothing … Nora Gregor and Jean Renoir in The Rules of the Game.
Photograph: Allstar/The Criterion Collection

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Oxford, I bought a volume of three novels by an author I hadn’t heard of, Henry Green. The Green people were talking about then had an e at the end of his surname, and his first name was Graham. He was almost an exact contemporary of Henry’s: born in 1904, a year before Green, he lived much longer. Both belonged to well-to-do families, but Green was particularly affluent. His father was an industrialist. I’d tried reading Graham Greene, but had never made much headway. Then Henry Green came along, and Graham swiftly became, for me, the “other Greene”, and then not even that. About Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him.

I must have bought the three-novel volume of Loving, Living, Party Going because John Updike had, in his introduction to the volume, not only given Green centrality as a precursor, but called him a “saint of the mundane”. The religious analogy was excessive, but what had made me admire Updike in the first place was the way in which he’d deliberately made room for the mundane, for the banality that fills our lives and makes them truly interesting. And yet I found Green to be a different kind of writer, with almost none of the chronicler’s impulse that from time to time directed Updike’s decade-long projects, and with no abiding interest in realism, despite his extraordinary eye and ear and his gift for capturing character. Replying to a question put to him by Terry Southern for the Paris Review in 1958 – “You’ve described your novels as ‘nonrepresentational’. I wonder if you’d mind defining that term?” – Green said:

“Nonrepresentational” was meant to represent a picture which was not a photograph, nor a painting on a photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For instance, the very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding things all round them which have not in fact been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a new level of communication is reached. My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life, yet they do so less than I. Thus, when writing, I “represent” very closely what I see (and I’m not seeing so well now) and what I hear (which is little) but I say it is “nonrepresentational” because it is not necessarily what others see and hear.

Green in fact stands somewhere between James Joyce, in his tendency to be intolerant of “normal” English syntax and punctuation, and Virginia Woolf, in his sense of how narrative can be shaped by things outside of event. But, as is clear from his remarks to Southern, Green further conflates his aesthetic with disability and eccentricity. (Right at the start of the interview, he refuses to field an inconvenient question on the grounds that he can’t hear the interviewer, though it quickly becomes evident that the deafness is opportunistic.) More than Joyce and Woolf or any other writer I can think of, Green’s contribution to the modern novel is the imprimatur of an unapologetic eccentricity and, through it, a reconfiguring of the idea of singularity.

I have seen that Picador omnibus edition in the hands of readers and teachers, creased, carried with a degree of protectiveness. But, by all accounts, it didn’t do well and soon went out of print. Since then, Green’s nine novels have had spasmodic resurrections, come and gone and come back again. What will it take for Green to penetrate the general consciousness? His writing went out of view after he died in 1973 (and he hadn’t written a book for 20 years before that), though more recently a handful of influential literary champions made him something of a cause. But maybe it’s to do with what Ezra Pound called “the age”. Maybe the recent decades haven’t been receptive to a novelist whose sole purpose seems to be to fashion a language with which to communicate joy. Woolf was shockingly neglected; her present status owes not so much to literary critics as to feminism. Jean Rhys was utterly forgotten until her last work, Wide Sargasso Sea, allowed her to be annexed later by postcolonialists. Joyce’s mythic scaffolding and verbal play identified him to academia as being essential both to modernism and to the project of hermeneutics. I mention these writers not only because of their capacity to transform and delight but also because some aspect of their writing has been translated advantageously into a set of terms that are important to particular literary historical moments. With Green, we’re presented with a singular kind of artist who, like the poets of ancient India and Greece, has nothing to offer us but delight. We don’t know what to do with such a writer.

With Green, we have a singular artist who has nothing to offer us but delight. We don’t know what to do with him

I hesitate to call Party Going a modernist work because it’s sui generis, stands on its own, and has not lent itself out to the modernism industry. But it has something in common with standard modernist texts, by which I mean not only what Frank Kermode called its mythic structure, or its mythic punctuation of dead pigeons and bathing women, or its purgatorial fogbound environment, or the occasional abnormality of its syntax, but the fact that it’s interested in not the journey but the waiting, not the event but the interruption. Dense fog in London causes all trains to be cancelled. Traffic on the roads is at a standstill; some of the people on their way to the station have to abandon their cars and walk – a moment of both liberation from, and loss of, class privilege. Among throngs of frustrated but jubilant commuters a group of rich people has convened; they expect to travel to the south of France as guests of the eligible Max Adey. Two women especially are in pursuit of Max: Julia Wray and Amabel. Max has been meaning to escape Amabel, but she tracks him down. In the meantime, the whole group has been moved to the station hotel and given rooms with baths; the shutters to the station have been brought down. Amabel somehow finds her way inside, and Max is at once ashamed, caught out, and temporarily disarmed by her immense beauty. It seems to Julia, whom Max had been courting in a room not long ago, that her putative romantic holiday with Max is not to be.

The simultaneity of the narrative makes it less like a text overseen by an omniscient narrator than a particular kind of cinema, a cinema not so much invested in a single protagonist as in what’s happening at once in several rooms and the spaces around them. The material has been organised by an auteur akin, in his method, to a film editor, as a montage of swiftly intercut scenes that creates an illusion of unity and continuity. The restricted but unique locale and the limited duration of the action evoke Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which – depicting a group of upper-class people with conflicting love interests who find themselves stranded along with their servants in a manor house on a country estate during the weekend – too makes a narrative out of nothing. Released, like Party Going, in 1939, the film isn’t about either belonging somewhere or being in exile; it is about inhabiting a transient, busy state of unfinishedness. The aesthetic of the two works is remarkably congruent. Both also appear just prior to the destruction of the worlds contained within them, and both possess an odd indestructibility. Renoir’s film was trashed by both the right and the left for its pointless portrayal of the wasteful rich, only to be recognised in later decades as a landmark of cinema.

Self-absorbed upper classes … Satyajit Ray’s Kanchenjungha.

Kanchenjungha (1962) – by Renoir’s most gifted student, Satyajit Ray – is named after the mountain peak that the film’s upper-class holidaymakers are reminded of as they mill around the hill station of Darjeeling. They are completely self-absorbed, while the Kanchenjungha offers an opening into a world beyond that refuses to present itself. “Can you believe this place was nothing but a Lepcha village before the British turned it into this town?” says the insufferable patriarch Sir Indranath towards the end of the film. Empire! It was insubstantial by 1962, like the mist. It’s becoming intangible in Party Going too, but not quite as much. It’s there, in the global allusions, the great railways.

Ray’s film is in real time. The experience of reading Party Going approximates this – the sense of having entered, via the sentence, a specific continuum and time span. The four or five hours it takes to finish the novel is also the period in which the fog rolls in and then starts to lift. The spell lifts too, and we realise we’ve entered a world we can’t possess. This conflation of the characters’ time with the reader’s points to the author’s preoccupation with and mastery of form, which is another kind of reality to the one the novel is depicting – the consequence of his abstract “nonrepresentational” method.

Party Going is an assemblage of moments, and of different kinds of awareness of the world, and even of writing

Party Going isn’t a novel in the usual sense of the term. It gives us a wonderfully comic account of its characters, but it is also an assemblage – of moments, and of different kinds of awareness of the world and even of writing. Green is nothing if not conscious of his literary context: when Julia walks to the station and registers the procession of headlights in the dark, the narrator points back to the novel’s antecedents: “These lights would come like thoughts in darkness, in a stream …” Then there are the epic similes, signalling to us that Green lived in a time when the English writer’s inheritance went far beyond European modernism. Here the narrator describes two people in Max’s party waiting in the station to spot their host:

Like two lilies in a pond, romantically part of it but infinitely remote, surrounded, supported, floating in it if you will, but projected by being different on to another plane, though there was so much water you could not see these flowers or were liable to miss them, stood Miss Crevy and her young man, apparently serene, envied for their obviously easy circumstances and Angela coveted for her looks by all those water beetles if you like, by those people standing round.

Green makes these vivid, semi-ironical comparisons repeatedly. Here, the simile concerns the station master’s view of crowds of smokers, “every third person smoking it might all have looked to Mr Roberts, ensconced in his office away above, like November sun striking through mist rising off water”. As Max and Amabel talk on the phone before he heads off to the station (he is lying to her about his intentions), her observation that “here we are like a couple of old washerwomen slanging away at each other” sounds more striking than it should, as if Amabel were unwittingly situating the story in a world history of the epic. Two pages on, as Alex proceeds through the fog in a taxi, it seems that the “[s]treets he went through were wet as though that fog 20 foot up had deposited water, and reflections which lights slapped over the roadways suggested to him he might be a Zulu, in the Zulu’s hell of ice, seated in his taxi in the part of Umslopogaas with his axe, skin beating over the hole in his temple ...”. And Robert Hignam, as he presses through the crowd in the station, remembers:

When small he had found patches of bamboo in his parents’ garden and it was his romance at that time to force through them; they grew so thick you could not see what temple might lie in ruins just beyond. It was so now, these bodies so thick they might have been a store of tailors’ dummies, water heated. They were so stiff they might as well have been soft, swollen bamboos in groves only because he had once pushed through these, damp and warm.

The shutters are soon going to come down in the station, keeping new commuters out; Max’s group is going to be at once nervously and luxuriously ensconced in the station hotel. Despite the sense of enclosure and imprisonment (“we are simply in a state of siege you know”), the narrative has already ramified and been placed in the “world”: Party Going is both a comedy and a cosmology. It’s not about being hemmed in or trapped, or about being English. It enacts a fluidity of perception where it’s also about being Zulu, about people being compared to branches, to “household servants in a prince’s service”, where Amabel is known not only in London but in “northern England” and Hyderabad, where the “thousands of Smiths, thousands of Alberts, hundreds of Marys” seen gathered below from a hotel window seem “woven tight as any office carpet or, more elegantly made, the holy Kaaba soon to set out for Mecca”. Party Going is partly art-house movie, with a unique soundtrack, and partly one of those extraordinary British texts, like Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, in which locality, eccentricity and even class flow in and out of other cultures. It’s this flow that is envisaged here in terms of the din, the murmurs, the silences, the laughter and the courtships that occur while the trains have stopped, so that any moment things might open up in an unlikely way.

• A new edition of Henry Green’s Party Going is published by NYRB Classics.